Smear me up.

I get nostalgic flipping through my mom's best recipes. I've stashed them among my own favourites and mixed them in with those saved from my children's preschool days. Play dough sits between mashed potatoes and angel cake. For some reason I filed coq au vin and Christmas turkey alongside paint extender.

Paint extender - hmm. Finger painting days are well behind me until the perfect grandson reaches the mucky stage. But body art is not.

I already have two tattoos. Hardly unique today, but 22 years ago sporting a tattoo was more radical. Mine are quite boring. You have to be a very good friend to locate them. Just two dots. One on my  breastbone and another under my arm. Boring - but useful radiation guides.

But make me giddy! Recently, I received an invitation to participate in a non-boring, body art afternoon.

Do you remember Dr. Hook's 60's raunchy lyrics, " Smear my body up with butter, take me to the Freakers' Ball?" That song partied well with beer kegs and togas 45 years ago.


But there I was "freakingly" approaching 70 and thinking of butter, as along with other women, I sipped a glass of  white, and smeared deliciously gooey red, yellow and blue paint all over my naked self.  Breasts, belly, legs, arms and face. That was fun enough but then I carefully crawled over a huge piece of white paper and splatted my random body parts down. A wiggle or two and thanks to the core exercises I suffer through at the gym, I performed a less than graceful plank and retreated without messing my surprisingly gorgeous image. What a blast! Smear, crawl, splat, plank up, retreat. Smear, crawl, splat, plank, up, retreat. I did it three times with three different colour combos.

A good time was had by all but, why do it?

Photographs of the gloriously colourful images have been taken. They will be digitized, sized and transferred to canvas. Then my body art, along with the other women's will be auctioned off by Vancouver's Diane's Lingerie, supporting CBCF. Supporters yes, but this time Diane's encouraged our "girls" to run free and unfettered.

Don't hope to discover which image is mine, unless you look very carefully and know what a certain scar looks like.

What I wouldn't do for CBCF. Cheerfully!